Frank McSherry’s article, “The Morals of Parker,” was given to me by Jesse Willis of SFFaudio. It’s from The Mystery Fancier, March/April 1984. It’s a fascinating piece, worth a close read.
One of these days I’ll transcribe it, but for now you get the PDF. I recommend downloading and printing it rather than trying to read it on your monitor.
You’ll find a lot to appreciate in this piece, and a lot to disagree with.
Let me raise a toast to the folks who put together and wrote for fanzines back before it was real easy for me and people like me to type a bunch of words and hit “publish.” My life was hugely enriched by their efforts, in the realms of music, movies, and literature, and probably a few I’m forgetting at the moment. My hat is tipped.
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Ah, The Mystery Fancier. Guy Townsend’s publication. Haven’t seen or heard from Guy in many years. All my issues of the zine are in the Texas A&M Cushing Library now. I’m sure I read this article in 1984, and it’ll be fun to revisit it.
Interesting stuff–I do get the feeling he wrote this some time after reading some of the novels, and may not have had all of them to hand (no internet booksellers to fill holes in your collection with back then).
While I rather predictably prefer my explanation of Parker’s odd ‘morality’, comparing him to a soldier at war is a good working theory. We know he served in WWII at a very young age, and that certainly would have been a formative influence on his character, if perhaps not in the way they talk about in those “Be All You Can Be” ads. I just don’t think that alone explains it, since millions of other young men had the same experience, and not one of them (that we know of) responded to it the way Parker did. Parker was looking for a pattern to follow in this strange world he’d been born into, a way to live among people that made sense to him. Human warfare would make no sense at all to him, but some of the ways an isolated military unit behaves in enemy territory–that would have struck a responsive chord.
Doesn’t explain his sexual cycle at all, so the writer just ignores that completely–or again, perhaps he hadn’t read the books that recently.
The description of Parker’s grilling of Mary in “The Score” can’t be quarreled with. But I don’t think it’s so much that Parker thinks Mary will be an asset to a job they’ve already pulled, as that he thinks she’ll be an asset to Grofield. A good mate. As indeed she was, and a rather exceptionally understanding one.
I’d be more interested in reading the Westlake interview from 1976, where he calls Parker emotionless–which we know he isn’t. Westlake describes his emotions to us. Actually, he seems to have said Parker was the MOST emotionless character he could find, and that’s not quite the same thing, is it?
I thought that name looked familiar–
//Fantastic World War II
Frank D. McSherry, Martin Greenberg, S. M. Stirling
Simon & Schuster, Jun 1, 1990 – 281 pages
In 1939 it looked like it would take a miracle to defeat Nazi Germany and Hirohito’s Japan. And science fiction writers endeavored to create that miracle–within their fiction. Included here are war stories of a fantastic world war, written before the war was decided at Hiroshima–and the new atomic age changed the course of history.//
We all tend to view everything we read and experience through a filter composed of our own interests. He was doing heavy research on WWII, and saw some familiar patterns.
And me, I just like wolves. And dogs. A lot. :)
I really liked this article–it made me realize that my Nietzsche theory is probably not a sensible answer. It doesn’t account for Parker any more than any of the other theories floated about, even the author’s soldier comparison. There are inherent contradictions in Parker that simply cannot be easily explained. The author mentioned a few, as did I in the Yahoo group.
Parker is more human than it would appear. I refuse to believe that his helping Grofield both times, saving Claire when she was well forewarned of the danger of staying home when dangerous men were coming there, can be explained away with any theory other than the fact that, even though he is mostly cold, remote, ruthless, he is, at times, surprisingly sentimental.
Is that such a horrible thing that this character we all cherish has some humanity?
So Parker is paradoxical and sometimes surprising and unpredictable–just like every other single human in the world. Just much less so.